THE CR.ITICS
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THE THEATR.E
DANGER.OUS LIAISONS
Tennessee Williams and David Mamet on the damage that we do.
BY JOHN LAHR.
W hen we first encounter Cate
Blanchett as Blanche DuBois in
the Sydney Theatre Company's thrilling
production of Tennessee Williams's "A
Streetcar Named Desire" (directed by Liv
Ullmann, at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music), she is literally backed into a cor-
ner, sitting on her small valise at the shad-
owy edge of the stage. As the Ink Spots' "If
I Didn't Carè' plays, Blanche takes a short,
almost imperceptible breath, then sets o
in a white suit and a floppy white sun hat,
for 632 Elysian Fields, where her younger
sister, Stella Kowalski (the excellent Robin
McLeavy), lives with her husband, Stan-
ley Goel Edgerton). Blanchès eyes flutter,
and the valise shifts in her hand, almost
too heavy for her taut, bony frame to carry.
Even before we know her story, her nervy
bearing tells us something about her his-
tory of abdication. As the play unfolds, the
extent of her losses becomes clear: she has
lost her husband, her family home, her job,
her good name, her purity, and, ultimately,
her sanity. This will be her last stand.
Blanche is the Everest of modern
American drama, a peak of psychological
complexity and emotional range, which
many stars have attempted and few have
conquered. Of the performances I've seen
in recent years, Jessica Lange's lacked the-
atrical amperage, N atasha Richardson's
was too bu
and Rachel Weisz's, in this
year's overpraised Donmar Warehouse
production in London, was too callow.
The challenge for the actress taking on
Blanche lies in fathoming her spiritual ex-
haustion, her paradoxical combination of
backbone and collapse. Blanche has worn
herself out, bearing her burden of guilt and
grief: and facing down the world with a
masquerade of Southern gaiety and grace.
She is looking-as Williams himself was
when he wrote the play-for" a cleft in the
rock of the world that I could hide in."
Blanchett, with her alert mind, her in-
formed heart, and her lithe, patrician sil-
houette, gets it right from the first beat.
"I've got to keep hold of myself:" Blanche
says, her spirits sinking with disappoint-
ment at the threadbare squalor of the one-
room apartment her sister shares with her
working-class husband. "Only Poe! Only
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!-could do it justice!
Out here I suppose is the ghoul-haunted
woodland of Weir!" she drawls to Stella,
flapping her long birdlike fingers in the di-
rection of the window and the railroad
tracks beyond. Blanchett doesn't make the
usual mistake of foreshadowing Blanchè s
end at the play's beginning; she allows
Blanche a slow, fascinating decline. And
she is compelling both as a brazen flirt and
as an amusing bitch. When Stella explains
that Stanley is Polish, for instance, Blanche
replies, 'They're something like the Irish,
aren't they? Only not so-highbrow." It's
part of Blanchett's great accomplishment
that she makes Blanche's self-loathing
as transparent and dramatic as her self-
regard. She hits every rue:fiù note of humor
and regret in Williams's dialogue. In one
desperate scene, in which Blanche explains
her sordid past to Stanley's friend Mitch
(Tim Richards), who has been disabused
of his romantic interest in her, she takes a
slug of Southern Comfort. "Southern
Comfort!" she exclaims. 'What is that, I
wonder?" Dishevelled, sitting on the floor
by the front door, she fesses up to Mitch.
''Yes, I had many intimacies with strang-
ers," she says, in a voice fatigued by heart-
break I don't expect to see a better perfor-
mance of this role in my lifetime.
I will, however, see a better set. Al-
though Ullmann gives the production
many masterly touches-there is no Big
Easy folderol here and almost no allegor-
ical flimflammery-she has allowed Ralph
Myers to lumber his set with an ungainly
fire escape, which cramps the left side of
the stage and inhibits important scenes
played there, and with a sort of lumpish
second story of mosdy black cinder block.
The set has not a whiff of lyrical New Or-
leans about it; the play might as well be
taking place in downtown Cleveland. The
bathroom where Blanche takes the long,
luxurious soaks that so enrage Stanley is a
makeshift construction inside the main
room. All the couple's arguments about
Blanche and her parlous situation happen
no more than a yard away from where
she's making her ablutions; it takes a pow-
erful suspension of disbelief to imagine
that she can't hear everything that's being
said. The design's one substantial asset is
the way it maximizes the sense of claustro-
phobia, turning the apartment into a litde
cave of carnality.
The cunning and dynamic Stanley is
the phallic force at the center ofWilliams's
tragedy. Edgerton, with his particular low-
key roughness, is superb in the role, and
although he doesn't have Marlon Branda s
sexual charisma-who could?-he man-
ages the rare feat of shedding that iconic
shadow. Edgerton is not a big man or an
especially brawny one. He has small,
watchful eyes. His face belies a brusque
and wary nature that veers between cruelty
and sentimentality. In one memorable
scene, when Stella asks Stanley to clear his
plate after the fiasco of Blanchè s birthday
party, Edgerton's Stanley spits food in her
face; in another, he sits, sopping wet, on
the edge of the tub that his poker-playing
buddies tossed him into, in poignant
drunken remorse over having punched his
pregnant wife in the face.
Ullmann's direction delivers so much
Southern belle: Cate Blanchett is pitch peifèct as Blanche DuBois in ':A Streetcar Named Desire." Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.